Miyata Saburō

Miyata Saburō (宮田三郎, 1924–2013) was a Shōwa-period Japanese printmaker who worked in the sōsaku-hanga (creative print) tradition, designing, carving, and printing his own blocks in keeping with the movement's ideal of the artist as sole maker. He was born in 1924 in Miasa, a village in the Kitaazumi District of Nagano Prefecture, now part of Ōmachi City. He graduated from a Nagano prefectural normal school in 1945 and taught school in Ōmachi until 1947, when illness led him to resign.

After the war Miyata settled in Tokyo, where he worked at his brother's art-supply shop in Shibuya and went on to establish the Tokyo Hanga Institute, devoting himself to printmaking and to developing materials and methods for the craft. His mature manner favored simplified planes of flat color bounded by stylized black outlines — a modern, graphic reworking of the classical Japanese landscape.

Miyata's masterwork is the series Scenery of Japan (the Miyata Saburō Collection of Woodblock Prints: Scenery of Japan), produced between 1970 and 1984. It comprises 240 woodblock prints issued in twelve volumes of twenty prints each, in a limited edition of one hundred sets; he carved and printed every block by hand, and each impression bears his circular red seal within the image. After completing the twelve volumes he added two further volumes devoted to the scenery of Shinshū — his native Nagano — bringing the project to fourteen volumes in all.

A member of the Nihon Hanga Kyōkai (Japan Print Association), Miyata also exhibited abroad, in international print exhibitions in Paris, Switzerland, São Paulo, and Kraków. In 1984 he received the Medal with Dark Blue Ribbon from the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan. His prints are represented in collections of twentieth-century Japanese prints, including the Lavenberg Collection of Japanese Prints.